Planning a couple trips from WA to BC this year - so long as we are allowed in. US border patrol has generally been less than pleasant (coming back as a citizen) at the car crossing for decades.
I wonder if they will still do that. My next time crossing will be the first with US citizenship and passport.
Best border encounter.
And the definition of refugee is frankly rather strict.
So, no, I can't really see it.
Much improved planning/bylaws, and a strong densification story with a lot of infill developments.
Very different story when I visit there now vs when I lived there in the 90s.
Let's Go Oilers.
No matter where I've visited or how repressive the regime, in all of my years of travel, I've never seen worse human beings than the US border patrol in Washington State. There's something fundamentally wrong going on up there and it's been like this for decades.
The Republican trend has been to worry less about their constituents as Republican voters care less and less about the actions or policy of their representatives and more about what conservative media is focused on. This makes money a far more effective means of deciding who holds seats. Money has always had an outsized effect on who wins their seat come next election, but where some candidates could succeed despite their oponents out-spending them, the republican party has become almost entirely "pay to win."
Americans need to expect their living circumstances to continue to decrease as representatives increasingly service wealth holders instead of constituents.
The reality is there's a dark thing at the heart of most people which tends towards an ethic of "might makes right", and holding government over the most powerful nation in the world and then explicitly propagating that as official national religion is absolutely seductive.
Americans -- like many others -- crave supremacy. Fate and fortune has given them some form of it, and they've been told their whole lives how they deserve it.
But they feel it slipping. "Make America Great Again" is just about that. Others must submit and we will be most powerful.
This Canada stuff is just one small instance of it. The Greenland stuff is even more disturbing.
Their major concerns are God, Guns, sticking it to the “college educated elite”, getting rid of “illegals”, fighting against the demographic shift of the US becoming majority/minority, protecting Israel so Jesus will have some place to come back to (no exaggeration) and woke something or other.
You can’t get enough money to compete against Musk and the true MAGAs who vote in the primaries and forgive anything that Trump does.
Besides with gerrymandering, most Republican seats are safe Republican seats.
Even without gerrymandering, there are entire states that are never going to vote for a Democrat.
This is map of red vs blue counties.
https://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:720/format:webp/1*86sU...